Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Jonathan Willis made an excellent post on Hockey or Die today about the benefits of arbitration for fringe and depth players in the NHL. Essentially, the main benefit for a fringe player is not necessarily that he'll be awarded a higher salary but that his team will be forced to re-sign him if the arbitrator awards a salary below a certain cut-off point.

Right now, the Canucks have only two players going to arbitration; Shane "Pain Lion" O'Brien wisely elected to forgo arbitration and accept his qualifying offer, while Tanner Glass was headed to arbitration before Gillis stepped in and signed him, and no one's in a huge hurry to re-sign Mario Bliznak and Eric Walsky. That leaves Mason Raymond and Jannik Hansen as the two remaining RFA's, both of whom filed for arbitration. Of the two, the cut-off point clearly won't affect Raymond, who will most likely be awarded between 2.5 and 3.5 million in arbitration, well above the suspected 1.3 million cut-off.

For Jannik Hansen, however, arbitration will likely net him a one-way deal between 600,000 and 800,000, which fits right in under the cut-off. The Canucks won't be able to walk away from that decision and likely won't want to. It will, however, give Hansen a leg-up going into training camp. With a one-way contract, he's less likely to be sent down to the Manitoba Moose, which may help him find a spot on the third or fourth line. Players on two-way contracts like Victor Oreskovich, Alexandre Bolduc, Jeff Tambellini, and prospects Sergei Shirokov, Cody Hodgson, and Jordan Schroeder may be more likely to get sent down than Jannik Hansen.

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